At Sky Sports, they still called him “the Voice”. Richard Keys, the long-serving anchorman to Martin Tyler in the commentary box, claimed this weekend this was because Tyler “definitely didn’t have a face for TV” – throwing us back to a now distant, coarser era of broadcasting.
At 77, Tyler is the perennial who floated above the eras. Viewers of 40-plus will recall his career extending far further back than before football began in 1992. At both the 1982 and 1986 World Cups, Tyler acted as ITV’s main commentator while Brian Moore stayed in a London studio before flying out for the latter tournament’s final. Back in the days of regional highlights making up ITV’s Big Match programme, Tyler was the voice of Yorkshire TV football and then Granada in the north-west. The more clipped Tyler of the pre-Sky years is prime commentary from an era of less meaning more.
Those overseas from the UK will recognise his vocal range of tenor to soprano from broadcasts of the World Cup and Euros in Australia and the United States. Tyler was everywhere he could be while top-level football was being played. He intends to remain so; accompanying the news he would no longer be with Sky was the message he did not yet consider himself retired.
Among his contemporaries, John Motson, two months older, who died earlier this year, had retired from live work in 2008 while Moore, the previous doyen of English football commentary, hung up his mic at 66 after the 1998 World Cup and died three years later. Barry Davies, now 85, stepped away from the BBC’s Match of the Day in 2004 at 66. Clive Tyldesley, the voice of ITV’s Champions League coverage during Sky’s early glory years and now 68, joins Tyler as last men standing, two vintage guns for hire.
After 30 seasons of being the voice of BSkyB’s “whole new ball game”, to recall the Premier League’s 1992 launch with its high-concept adverts, the music of Simple Minds and Sky Strikers, Tyler’s “and it’s live!” catchphrase has been discontinued. The last of the new school has left the Osterley HQ. That the game and world moved on around him is without question. It was as long ago as 2011 that the commentary-box partnership he shared with Andy Gray since 1990 was unceremoniously, notoriously severed.
Those early Sky days, that grainy, high-contrast analogue picture quality, great shooms of noise as replays dropped in, were full of bombast. Its frontmen, mindful of Rupert Murdoch’s desperate need to sell satellite dishes to keep the show on the road, operated as an aggressive on-air marketing department. While it may no longer feel daft to proclaim the Premier League as “the best in the world”, Sky were pushing that message as far back as the mid-1990s, when Serie A was clearly at a much higher level.
Tyler, whose public persona – overgrown 1950s schoolboy armed with scrapbook, just happy to catch the game – has never altered, played the role of enthusiastic straight man. It was Gray or Keys back in the studio who ratcheted up the hype to full shill mode. They were defenestrated and made persona non grata for a saga that began with some off-camera “banter” concerning the female match official Sian Massey. Gray was sacked, Keys resigned in solidarity, but Tyler stayed. He soon enough adapted to the new school of Gary Neville’s and Jamie Carragher’s combination of partisan squawks and pernickety analytical zeal.
Was Tyler to everyone’s tastes? The answer is no, mostly because football partisanship does odd things to people’s thinking. A football commentator is unlikely to receive unanimous approval ratings and likely to irritate fans of the losing team. Perhaps the vocal range registered as too shrill at moments of high drama for some, though others complained he underplayed other moments of significance.
Tyler would occasionally veer into moments of folksy reflection, recalling football men of deep obscurity to echo The Fast Show’s Ron Manager, and his taste for a pun was occasionally off-beam. “De-Bruyne. De-Gea. De-rby” in November 2020 remains a near-unforgivable atrocity. Still, the overall effect was that of someone remaining madly in love with football, a keeper of the faith that many have lost. To chat to Tyler in a press room before match is to catch someone full of enthusiasm for what lies ahead over 90 minutes.
In the social media era, fans of many Premier League clubs laid out evidence that Sky’s main man hated their team. None was remotely proven. If Tyler’s affections lay with anyone, then it was, beyond his associations with Woking and Corinthian Casuals, probably Arsenal – but then again, many Gunners are convinced of Tyler’s complete loathing of their club, inadvertently revealing his mastery of staying neutral, a mark of professionalism.
Those classic, now-viral moments like “Agüeroooooooo” and “that sums it up” filling the tributes were well-chosen explosions of dizzying excitement, clearly not pre-written as is the suspicion with other commentators. The quieting of “the Voice” was coming one day soon, but replacing him is a severe test for whoever takes the mic next.
